—LA FONTAINE.
If, after the departure of the Pratts, Rachel had hoped for a word with Hester, she was doomed to disappointment. Mr. Gresley took the seat on the sofa beside Rachel which Ada Pratt had vacated, and after a few kindly eulogistic remarks on the Bishop of Southminster and the responsibilities of wealth, he turned the conversation into the well-worn groove of Warpington.
Rachel proved an attentive listener, and after Mr. Gresley had furnished her at length with nutritious details respecting parochial work, he went on:
"I am holding this evening a temperance meeting in the Parish Room. I wish, Miss West, that I could persuade you to stay for it, and thus enlist your sympathies in a matter of vital importance."
"They have been enlisted in it for the last ten years," said Rachel, who was not yet accustomed to the invariable assumption on the part of Mr. Gresley that no one took an interest in the most obvious good work until he had introduced and championed it. "But," she added, "I will stay with pleasure."
Dick, who was becoming somewhat restive under Mrs. Gresley's inquiries about the Newhavens, became suddenly interested in the temperance meeting.
"I've seen many a good fellow go to the dogs through drink in the Colonies, more's the pity," Dick remarked. "I think I'll come too, James. And if you want a few plain words you call on me."
"I will," said Mr. Gresley, much gratified. "I always make a point of encouraging the laity—at least, those among them who are thoroughly grounded in Church teaching—to express themselves. Hear both sides, that is what I always say. The Bishop constantly enjoins on his clergy to endeavor to elicit the lay opinion. The chair this evening will be taken by Mr. Pratt, a layman."
The temperance meeting was to take place at seven o'clock, and possibly Rachel may have been biassed in favor of that entertainment by the hope of a quiet half-hour with Hester in her own room. At any rate, she secured it.
When they were alone Rachel produced Lady Newhaven's note.
"Do come to Westhope," she said. "While you are under this roof it seems almost impossible to see you, unless we are close to it," and she touched the sloping ceiling with her hand. "And yet I came to Westhope, and I am going on to Wilderleigh, partly in order to be near you."
Hester shook her head.
"The book is nearly finished," she said, the low light from the attic window striking sideways on the small face with its tightly compressed lips.
A spirit indomitable, immortal, looked for a moment out of Hester's gray eyes. The spirit was indeed willing, but the flesh was becoming weaker day by day.
"When it is finished," she went on, "I will go anywhere and do anything, but stay here I must till it is done. Besides, I am not fit for society at present. I am covered with blue mould. Do you remember how that horrid Lady Carbury used to laugh at the country squires' daughters for being provincial? I have gone a peg lower than being provincial—I have become parochial."
A knock came at the door, and Fräulein's mild, musical face appeared in the aperture.
"I fear to disturb you," she said, "but Regie say he cannot go to sleep till he see you."
Hester introduced Fräulein to Rachel, and slipped down-stairs to the night nursery.
Mary and Stella were already asleep in their high-barred cribs. The blind was down, and Hester could only just see the white figure of Regie sitting up in his night-gown. She sat down on the edge of the bed and took him in her arms.
"What is it; my treasure?"
"Auntie Hester, was I naughty about the flying half-penny?"
"No, darling. Why?"
"Because mother always says not to put pennies in my mouth, and I never did till to-day. And now Mary says I have been very naughty."
"It does not matter what Mary says," said Hester, with a withering glance towards the sleeping angel in the next crib, who was only Mary by day. "But you must never do it again, and you will tell mother all about it to-morrow."
"Yes," said Regie; "but, but—"
"But what?"
"Uncle Dick did say it was a flying half-penny, and you said so, too, and that other auntie. And I thought it did not matter putting in flying half-pennies, only common ones."
Hester saw the difficulty in Regie's mind.
"It felt common when it was inside," said Regie, doubtfully, "and yet you and Uncle Dick did say it was a flying one."
Regie's large eyes were turned upon her with solemn inquiry in them. It is crises like this that our first ideals are laid low.
Regie had always considered Hester as the very soul of honor, that mysterious honor which he was beginning to dimly apprehend through her allegiance to it, and which, in his mind, belonged as exclusively to her as the little bedroom under the roof.
"Regie," said Hester, tremulously, seeing that she had unwittingly put a stumbling-block before the little white feet she loved, "when we played at the doll's tea-party, and you were the butler, I did not mean you were really a butler, did I? I knew, and you knew, and we all knew, that you were Regie all the time."
"Ye-es."
"It was a game. And so when Uncle Dick found us playing the tea-party game he played another game about the flying half-penny."
"Then it was a common half-penny, after all," said Regie, with a deep sigh.
"Yes, it was a common half-penny, only the game was that it could fly, like the other game was that the acorn cups were real teacups. So Uncle Dick and all of us were not saying what was not true. We were all playing at a game. Do you understand, my little mouse?"
"Yes," said Regie, with another voluminous sigh, and Hester realized, with thankfulness, that the half-penny and not herself had fallen from its pedestal. "I see now; but when he said, Hi! Presto! and it flew away, I thought I saw it flying. Mary said she did. And I suppose the gate was only a game, too."
Hester felt that the subject would be quite beyond her powers of explanation if once the gate were introduced into it.
She laid Regie down and covered him.
"And you will go to sleep now. And I will ask Uncle Dick when next he comes to show us how he did the game with the half-penny."
"Yes," said Regie, dejectedly. "I'd rather know what there is to be known. Only I thought it was a flying one. Good-night, Auntie Hester."
She stayed beside him a few minutes until his even breathing showed her he was asleep, and then slipped back to her own room. The front-door bell was ringing as she came out of the nursery. The temperance deputation from Liverpool had arrived. Mr. Gresley's voice of welcome could be heard saying that it was only ten minutes to seven.
Accordingly, a few minutes before that hour, Mr. Gresley and his party entered the Parish Room. It was crammed. The back benches were filled with a large contingent of young men, whose half-sheepish, half-sullen expression showed that their presence was due to pressure. Why the parishioners had come in such numbers it would be hard to say. Perhaps even a temperance meeting was a change in the dreary monotony of rural life at Warpington. Many of the faces bore the imprint of this monotony, Rachel thought, as she refused the conspicuous front seat pointed out to her by Mrs. Gresley, and sat down near the door with Hester.
Dick, who had been finishing his cigarette outside, entered a moment later, and stood in the gangway, entirely filling it up, his eye travelling over the assembly, and, as Rachel well knew, looking for her. Presently he caught sight of her, wedged in four or five deep by the last arrivals. There was a vacant space between her and the wall, but it was apparently inaccessible. Entirely disregarding the anxious church-wardens who were waving him forward, Dick disappeared among the young men at the back, and Rachel thought no more of him until a large Oxford shoe descended quietly out of space upon the empty seat near her, and Dick, who had persuaded the young men to give him foot-room on their seats, and had stepped over the high backs of several "school forms," sat down beside her.
It was neatly done, and Rachel could not help smiling. But the thought darted through her mind that Dick was the kind of man who, somehow or other, would succeed where he meant to succeed, and would marry the woman he intended to marry. There was no doubt that she was that woman, and as he sat tranquilly beside her she wished, with a nervous tremor, that his choice had fallen on some one else.
The meeting opened with nasal and fervent prayer on the part of a neighboring Archdeacon. No one could kneel down except the dignitaries on the platform, but every one pretended to do so. Mr. Pratt, who was in the chair, then introduced the principal speaker. Mr. Pratt's face, very narrow at the forehead, became slightly wider at the eyes, widest when it reached round the corners of the mouth, and finally split into two long, parti-colored whiskers. He assumed on these occasions a manner of pontifical solemnity towards his "humble brethren," admirably suited to one who, after wrestling for many years with a patent oil, is conscious that he has blossomed out into a "county family."
The Warpington parishioners listened to him unmoved.
The deputation from Liverpool followed, a thin, ascetic-looking man of many bones and little linen, who spoke with the concentrated fury of a fanatic against alcohol in all its varieties. Dick, who had so far taken more interest in Rachel's gloves, which she had dropped, and with which he was kindly burdening himself, than in the proceedings, drew himself up and fixed his steel eyes on the speaker.
A restive movement in the audience followed the speech, which was loudly clapped by Mr. Gresley and the Pratts.
Mr. Gresley then mounted the platform.
Mr. Gresley had an enormous advantage as a platform speaker, and as a preacher in the twin pulpits of church and home, owing to the conviction that he had penetrated to the core of any subject under discussion, and could pronounce judgment upon it in a conclusive manner. He was wont to approach every subject by the preliminary statement that he had "threshed it out." This threshing-out had been so thorough that there was hardly a subject even of the knottiest description which he was unable to dismiss with a few pregnant words. "Evolution! Ha! ha! Descended from an ape. I don't believe that for one." While women's rights received their death-blow from a jocose allusion to the woman following the plough while the man sat at home and rocked the cradle.
With the same noble simplicity he grappled with the difficult and complex subject of temperance, by which he meant total abstinence. He informed his hearers, "in the bigoted tones of a married teetotaler," that he had gone to the root of the matter—the roots were apparently on the surface—and that it was no use calling black white and white black. He for one did not believe in muddling up black and white, as some lukewarm people advocated, till they were only a dirty gray. No; either drink was right or it was wrong. If it was not wrong to get drunk, he did not know what was wrong. He was not a man of compromise. Alcohol was a servant of the devil, and to tamper with it was to tamper with the Evil One himself. Touch not. Taste not. Handle not. He for his part should never side with the devil.
This lofty utterance having been given time to sink in, Mr. Gresley looked round at the sea of stolid, sullen faces, and concluded with saying that the chairman would now call upon his cousin, Mr. Vernon, to speak to them on the shocking evils he himself had witnessed in Australia as the results of drink.
Dick was not troubled by shyness. He extricated himself from his seat with the help of the young men, and slowly ascended the platform. He looked a size too large for it, and for the other speakers, and his loose tweed suit and heather stockings were as great a contrast to the tightly buttoned-up black of the other occupants as were his strong, keen face and muscular hands to those of the previous speakers.
"That's a man," said a masculine voice behind Rachel. "He worn't reared on ditch-water, you bet."
"Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen," said Dick. "You've only got to listen to me for half a minute, and you'll find out without my telling you that Nature did not cut me out for a speaker. I'm no talker. I'm a workingman"—an admission which Mr. Pratt would rather have been boiled in his own oil than have made. "For the last seven years I've done my twelve hours a day, and I've come to think more of what a man gets through with his hands than the sentiments which he can wheeze out after a heavy meal. But Mr. Gresley has asked me to tell you what I know about drink, as I have seen a good many samples of it in Australia."
Dick then proceeded, with a sublime disregard of grammar, and an earnestness that increased as he went on, to dilate on the evil effects of drink as he himself had witnessed them. He described how he had seen men who could not get spirits make themselves drunk on "Pain-killer"; how he had seen strong, young station hands, who had not tasted spirits for months, come down from the hills with a hundred pounds in their pockets, and drink themselves into "doddery" old men in a fortnight in the nearest township, where they were kept drunk on drugged liquor till all their hard-earned wages were gone.
The whole room listened in dead silence. No feet shuffled. Mr. Gresley looked patronizingly at Dick's splendid figure and large, outstretched hand, with the crooked middle finger, which he had cut off by mistake in the bush and had stuck on again himself. Then the young Vicar glanced smiling at the audience, feeling that he had indeed elicited a "lay opinion" of the best kind.
"Now what are the causes of all these dreadful things?" continued Dick. "I'm speaking to the men here, not the women. What are the causes of all this poverty and vice and scamped workmanship, and weak eyes and shaky hands, on the top of high wages? I tell you they come from two things, and one is as bad as the other. One is drinking too much, and the other is drinking bad liquor. Every man who's worth his salt," said Dick, balancing his long bent finger on the middle of his other palm, "should know when he has had enough. Some can carry more, some less." Mr. Gresley started and signed to Dick, but Dick did not notice. "Bad liquor is at the root of half the drunkenness I know. I don't suppose there are many publicans here to-night, for this meeting isn't quite in their line; and if there are, they can't have come expecting compliments. But if you fellows think you get good liquor at the publics round here, I tell you you are jolly well mistaken."
"Hear! hear!" shouted several voices.
"I've been in the course of the last week to most of the public-houses in Southminster and Westhope and Warpington to see what sort of stuff they sold, and upon my soul, gentlemen, if I settled in Warpington I'd, I'd"—Dick hesitated for a simile strong enough—"I'd turn teetotaler until I left it again, rather than swallow the snake poison they serve out to you."
There was a general laugh, in the midst of which Mr. Gresley, whose complexion had deepened, sprang to his feet and endeavored to attract Dick's attention, but Dick saw nothing but his audience. Mr. Gresley began to speak in his high, "singsong" voice.
"My young friend," he said, "has mistaken the object of this meeting. In short I must—"
"Not a bit," said Dick—"not a bit; but if the people have had enough of me I'll take your chair while you have another innings."
In a moment the room was in an uproar.
Shouts of "No, no," "Go on," "Let him speak."
In the tumult Mr. Gresley's voice, instead of being the solo, became but as one instrument—albeit a trombone—in an orchestra.
"But I thoroughly agree with the gentlemen who spoke before me," said Dick, when peace was restored. "Total abstinence is a long chalk below temperance, but it's better than drunkenness any day. And if a man can't get on without three-finger nips, let him take the pledge. There are one or two here to-night who would be the better for it. But, to my thinking, total abstinence is like a water mattress. It is good for a sick man, and it's good for a man with a weak will, which is another kind of illness. But temperance is for those who are in health. There is a text in the Bible about wine making glad the heart of man. That's a good text, and one to go on. As often as not texts are like bags, and a man crams all his own rubbish into them, and expects you to take them together. There are some men, who ought to know better, who actually get out of that text by saying the Bible means unfermented liquor"—Mr. Gresley became purple. "Does it? Then how about the other place where we hear of new wine bursting old bottles. What makes them burst? Fermentation, of course, as every village idiot knows. No, I take it when the Bible says wine it means wine. Wine's fermented liquor, and what's unfermented liquor? Nothing but 'pop.'"
Dick pronounced the last word with profound contempt, which was met with enthusiastic applause.
"My last word to you, gentlemen," continued Dick, "is, keep in mind two points: first, look out for an honest publican, if there is such an article, who will buy only the best liquor from the best sources, and is not bound by the breweries to sell any stuff they send along. Join together, and make it hot for a bound publican. Kick him out, even if he is the Squire's butler." Mr. Pratt's complexion became apoplectic. "And the second point is, Remember some men have heads and some haven't. It is no use for a lame man entering for a hurdle-race. A strong man can take his whack—if it's with his food—and it will do him good, while a weak man can't hang up his hat alter the first smile."
A storm of applause followed, which was perhaps all the heartier by reason of the furious face of Mr. Gresley. Dick was clapped continuously as he descended the platform and slowly left the room, feeling in his pockets for his tobacco-pouch. A squad of young men creaked out after him, and others followed by twos and threes, so that the mellifluous voice of Mr. Pratt was comparatively lost, who, disregarding his position as chairman, now rose to pour oil—of which, in manner alone, he had always a large supply—on the troubled waters. Mr. Pratt had felt a difficulty in interrupting a member of a county family, which with the eye of faith he plainly perceived Dick to be, and at the same time a guest of "Newhaven's." The Pratts experienced in the rare moments of their intercourse with the Newhavens some of that sublime awe, that subdued rapture, which others experience in cathedrals. Mr. Pratt had also taken a momentary pleasure in the defeat of Mr. Gresley, who did not pay him the deference which he considered due to him and his "seat." Mr. Pratt always expected that the Vicar should, by reason of his small income, take the position of a sort of upper servant of the Squire; and he had seen so many instances of this happy state of things that he was perpetually nettled by Mr. Gresley's "independent" attitude; while Mr. Gresley was equally irritated by "the impatience of clerical control" and shepherding which Mr. Pratt, his largest and woolliest sheep, too frequently evinced.
As the chairman benignly expressed his approval of both views, and toned down each to meet the other, the attention of the audience wandered to the occasional laughs and cheers which came from the school play-ground. And when, a few minutes later, Rachel emerged with the stream, she saw Dick standing under the solitary lamp-post speaking earnestly to a little crowd of youths and men. The laughter had ceased. Their crestfallen appearance spoke for itself.
"Well, good-night, lads," said Dick, cordially, raising his cap to them, and he rejoined Rachel and Hester at the gate.
When Dick and Rachel had departed on their bicycles, and when the deputation, after a frugal supper, had retired to rest, and when the drawing-room door was shut, then, and not till then, did Mr. Gresley give vent to his feelings.
"And he would not stop," he repeated over and over again almost in hysterics, when the total-abstinence hose of his wrath had been turned on Dick until every reservoir of abuse was exhausted. "I signed to him; I spoke to him. You saw me speak to him, Minna, and he would not stop."
Hester experienced that sudden emotion which may result either in tears or laughter at the cruel anguish brought upon her brother by the momentary experience of what he so ruthlessly inflicted.
"He talked me down," said Mr. Gresley, his voice shaking. "He opposed me in my own school-room. Of course, I blame myself for asking him to speak. I ought to have inquired into his principles more thoroughly, but he took me in entirely by saying one thing in this room and the exact opposite on the platform."
"I thought his views were the same in both places," said Hester, "and, at the time, I admired you for asking him to speak, considering he is a vine-grower."
"A what?" almost shrieked Mr. Gresley.
"A vine-grower. Surely you know he has one of the largest vineyards in South Australia?"
For a moment Mr. Gresley was bereft of speech.
"And you knew this and kept silence," he said at last, while Mrs. Gresley looked reproachfully, but without surprise, at her sister-in-law.
"Certainly. What was there to speak about? I thought you knew."
"I never heard it till this instant. That quite accounts for his views. He wants to push his own wines. Of course, drunkenness is working for his interests. I understand it all now. He has undone the work of years by that speech for the sake of booking a few orders. It is contemptible. I trust, Hester, he is not a particular friend of yours, for I shall feel it my duty to speak very strongly to him if he comes again."
But Dick did not appear again. He was off and away before the terrors of the Church could be brought to bear on him.
But his memory remained green at Warpington.
"They do say," said Abel to Hester a few days later, planting his spade on the ground, and slowly scraping off upon it the clay from his nailed boots, "as that Muster Vernon gave 'em a dusting in the school-yard as they won't forget in a hurry. He said he could not speak out before the women folk, but he was noways nesh to pick his words onst he was outside. Barnes said as his tongue 'ud 'ave raised blisters on a hedge stake. But he had a way with him for all that. There was a deal of talk about him at market last Wednesday, and Jones and Peg is just silly to go back to Australy with 'im. I ain't sure," continued Abel, closing the conversation by a vigorous thrust of his spade into the earth, "as one of the things that fetched 'em all most wasn't his saying that since he's been in a hot climate he knowed what it was to be tempted himself when he was a bit down on his luck or a bit up. Pratts would never have owned to that." The village always spoke of Mr. Pratt in the plural without a prefix. "I've been to a sight of temperance meetings, because," with indulgence, "master likes it, tho' I always has my glass, as is natural. But I never heard one of the speakers kind of settle to it like that. That's what the folks say; that for all he was a born gentleman he spoke to 'em as man to man, not as if we was servants or childer."
CHAPTER XIX
La plainte est pour le sot.
L'honnête homme trompé
S'en va et ne dit mot.
—M. DELANONI
"And so you cannot persuade Miss Gresley to come to us next week?" said Lord Newhaven, strolling into the dining-room at Westhope Abbey, where Rachel and Dick were sitting at a little supper-table laid for two in front of the high altar. The dining-room had formerly been the chapel, and the carved stone altar still remained under the east window.
Lord Newhaven drew up a chair, and Rachel felt vaguely relieved at his presence. He had a knack of knowing when to appear and when to efface himself.
"She can't leave her book," said Rachel.
"Her first book was very clever," said Lord Newhaven, "and, what was more, it was true. I hope for her own sake she will outgrow her love of truth, or it will make deadly enemies for her."
"And good friends," said Rachel.
"Possibly," said Lord Newhaven, looking narrowly at her, and almost obliged to believe that she had spoken without self-consciousness. "But if she outgrows all her principles, I hope, at any rate, she won't outgrow her sharp tongue. I liked her ever since she first came to this house, ten years ago, with Lady Susan Gresley. I remember saying that Captain Pratt; who called while she was here, was a 'bounder.' And Miss Gresley said she did not think he was quite a bounder, only on the boundary-line. If you knew Captain Pratt, that describes him exactly."
"I wish she had not said it," said Rachel, with a sigh. "She makes trouble for herself by saying things like that. Is Lady Newhaven in the drawing-room?"
"Yes, I heard her singing 'The Lost Chord' not ten minutes ago."
"I will go up to her," said Rachel.
"I do believe," said Lord Newhaven, when Rachel had departed, "that she has an affection for Miss Gresley."
"It is not necessary to be a detective in plain clothes to see that," said Dick.
"No. It generally needs to be a magnifying-glass to see a woman's friendship, and then they are only expedients till we arrive, Dick. You need not he jealous of Miss Gresley. Miss West will forget all about her when she is Mrs. Vernon."
"She does not seem very keen about that," said Dick, grimly. "I'm only marking time. I'm no forwarder than I was."
"Well, it's your own fault for fixing your affections on a woman who is not anxious to marry. She has no objection to you. It is marriage she does not like."
"Oh, that's bosh!" said Dick. "All women wish to be married, and if they don't they ought to."
He felt that an invidious reflection had been east on Rachel.
"All the same, a man with one eye can see that women with money, or anything that makes them independent of us, don't flatter us by their alacrity to marry us. They will make fools of themselves for love—none greater—and they will marry for love. But their different attitude towards us, their natural lords and masters, directly we are no longer necessary to them as stepping-stones to a home and a recognized position, revolts me. If you had taken my advice at the start, you would have made up to one among the mob of women who are dependent on marriage for their very existence. If a man goes into that herd he will not be refused. And if he is it does not matter. It is the blessed custom of piling everything on to the eldest son, and leaving the women of the family almost penniless, which provides half of us with wives without any trouble to ourselves. Whatever we are, they have got to take us. The average dancing young woman living in luxury in her father's house is between the devil and the deep sea. We are frequently the devil; but it is not surprising that she can't face the alternative—a poverty to which she was not brought up, and in which she has seen her old spinster aunts. But I suppose in your case you really want the money?"
Dick looked rather hard at Lord Newhaven.
"I should not have said that unless I had known it to be a lie," continued the latter, "because I dislike being kicked. But, Dick, listen to me. You have not," with sudden misgiving, "laid any little matrimonial project before her this evening, have you?"
"No; I was not quite such a fool as that."
"Well! Such things do occur. Moonlight, you know, etc. I was possessed by a devil once, and proposed by moonlight, as all my wife's friends know, and probably her maid. But, seriously, Dick, you are not making progress, as you say yourself."
"Well!" rather sullenly.
"Well, on-lookers see most of the game. Miss West may—I don't say she is—but if things go on as they are for another week she may become slightly bored. That was why I joined you at supper. She had had, for the time, enough."
"Of me?" said Dick, reddening under his tan.
"Just so. It is a matter of no importance after marriage, but it should be avoided beforehand. Are you really in earnest about this?"
Dick delivered himself slowly and deliberately of certain platitudes.
"Well, I hope I shall hear you say all that again some day in a condensed form before a clergyman. In the meanwhile—"
"In the meanwhile I had better clear out."
"Yes; I don't enjoy saying so in the presence of my own galantine and mayonnaise, but that is it. Go, and—come back."
"If you have a Bradshaw," said Dick, "I'll look out my train now. I think there is an express to London about seven in the morning, if you can send me to the station."
"But the post only comes in at eight."
"Well, you can send my letters after me."
"I dare say I can, my diplomatist. But you are not going to leave till the post has arrived, when you will receive business letters requiring your immediate presence in London. You are not going to let a woman know that you leave on her account."
"You are very sharp, Cackles," said Dick, drearily. "And I'll take a leaf out of your book and lie, if you think it is the right thing. But I expect she will know very well that the same business which took me to that infernal temperance meeting has taken me to London."
Rachel was vaguely relieved when Dick went off next morning. She was not, as a rule, oppressed by the attentions she received from young men, which in due season became "marked," and then resulted in proposals neatly or clumsily expressed. But she was disturbed when she thought of Dick, and his departure was like the removal of a weight, not a heavy, but still a perceptible one. For Rachel was aware that Dick was in deadly earnest, and that his love was growing steadily, almost unconsciously, was accumulating like snow, flake by flake, upon a mountain-side. Some day, perhaps not for a long time, but some day, there would be an avalanche, and, in his own language, she "would be in it."
CHAPTER XX
Si l'on vous a trahi, ce n'est pas la trahison qui importe; c'est le pardon qu'elle a fait naître dans votre âme. . . . Mais si la trahison n'a pas accru la simplicité, la confiance plus haute, l'étendue de l'amour, on vous aura trahi bien inutilement, et vous pouvez vous dire qu'il n'est rien arrivé.—MAETERLINCK.
Rachel and Hester were sitting in the shadow of the church-yard wall where Hester had so unfortunately fallen asleep on a previous occasion. It was the first of many clandestine meetings. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley did not realize that Hester and Rachel wished to "talk secrets," as they would have expressed it, and Rachel's arrival was felt by the Gresleys to be the appropriate moment to momentarily lay aside their daily avocations, and to join Hester and Rachel in the garden for social intercourse. The Gresleys liked Rachel. Listeners are generally liked. Perhaps also her gentle, unassuming manner was not an unpleasant change after the familiar nonchalance of the Pratts.
The two friends bore their fate for a time in inward impatience, and then, not without compunction, "practised to deceive." Certain obtuse persons push others, naturally upright, into eluding and outwitting them, just as the really wicked people, who give vivâ voce invitations, goad us into crevasses of lies, for which, if there is any justice anywhere, they will have to answer at the last day. Mr. Gresley gave the last shove to Hester and Rachel by an exhaustive harangue on what he called socialism. Finding they were discussing some phase of it, he drew up a chair and informed them that he had "threshed out" the whole subject.
"Socialism," he began, delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. "Community of goods. People don't see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can't knock that into people's heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought he was more educated and a shade less thoughtless than the idle rich usually are, and that he would see it if it was put plainly before him. But he only said my arguments were incontrovertible, and slipped away."
It was after this conversation, or rather monologue, that Hester and Rachel arranged to meet by stealth.
They were sitting luxuriously in the short grass, with their backs against the church-yard wall, and their hats tilted over their eyes.
"I wish I had met this Mr. Dick five or six years ago," said Rachel, with a sigh.
Hester was the only person who knew about Rachel's previous love disaster.
"Dick always gets what he wants in the long run," said Hester. "I should offer to marry him at once, if I were you. It will save a lot of trouble, and it will come to just the same in the end."
Rachel laughed, but not light-heartedly. Hester had only put into words a latent conviction of her own which troubled her.
"Dick is the right kind of man to marry," continued Hester, dispassionately. "What lights he has he lives up to. If that is not high praise, I don't know what is. He is good, but somehow his goodness does not offend one. One can condone it. And, if you care for such things, he has a thorough-going respect for women, which he carries about with him in a little patent safe of his own."
"I don't want to marry a man for his qualities and mental furniture," said Rachel, wearily. "If I did I would take Mr. Dick."
There was a short silence.
"I am sure," said Rachel at last, "that you do not realize how commonplace I am. You know those conventional heroines of second-rate novels, who love tremendously once, and then, when things go wrong, promptly turn into marble statues, and go through life with hearts of stone? Well, my dear, I am just like that. I know it's despicable. I have straggled against it. It is idiotic to generalize from one personal experience. I keep before my mind that other men are not like him. I know they aren't, but yet—somehow I think they are. I am frightened."
Hester turned her wide eyes towards her friend.
"Do you still consider, after these four years, that he did you an injury?"
Rachel looked out upon the mournful landscape. The weariness of midsummer was upon it. A heavy hand seemed laid upon the brow of the distant hills.
"I gave him everything I had," she said, slowly, "and he threw it away. I have nothing left for any one else. Perhaps it is because I am naturally economical," she added, smiling faintly, "that it seems now, looking back, such a dreadful waste."
"Only in appearance, not in reality," said Hester. "It looks like a waste of life, that mowing down of our best years by a relentless passion which itself falls dead on the top of them. But it is not so. Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was the poorer in the long-run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of all the reins.'"
"You mean it did me good," said Rachel, "and that he was a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don't take a burning interest in my own character. I don't find my mental stand-point—isn't that what Mrs. Loftus calls it?—very engrossing."
"He was a benefactor, all the same," said Hester, with decision. "I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of gratitude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?"
"Oh!" said Rachel, ruefully. "When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly."
"You are a true prophet, Rachel."
"Yes, executioner."
"My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself—not that that is saying much—to have saved you from that hour."
"I know it."
"But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank God! I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you—the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness—which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination—I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have had no more sympathy than she has. People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathize with what one has experienced. That is why they are always saying, 'as a mother,' or 'as a wife.' If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but from want of using your powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonized awakening, all the great realities of life—love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm—would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why I can't bear to hear her speak of them, because every word she says proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door—until then."
Silence.
"Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?"
No answer.
"Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?"
"No."
"But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents."
"Don't," said Rachel, her lip trembling.
"I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care now. You seek out those who need you. Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compassion and love for the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?"
"They were cheaply bought," said Rachel, with conviction, speaking with difficulty.
"Would you have learned them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?"
"Oh, Hester! would anybody?"
"Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would you?"
"N—no," said Rachel.
There was a long silence.
Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."
At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.
"I see what you mean," she said; "I have not reached the place yet; but I can believe that I shall come to it some day, when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty. Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman, without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn—by experience. I have been very fortunate."
Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel's hands. It was as if she had said, "Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me." And the action was so understood.
Rachel colored, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.
"How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?" said Rachel, in a whisper. "When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you know them?"
A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester's face. "'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester's voice altered.
"Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James. You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love-scenes in the Idyll were put together from scraps I had collected of James's engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the Idyll. And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane passages are all that are left to me as my own."
"You are profane now," said Rachel, smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.
A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them, imitating a charger, while Fräulein and the two little girls followed.
Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.
"Where is Uncle Dick?" he said.
"I don't know," said Rachel, reddening, in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.
"Then he has not come with you?"
Regie's mind was what his father called "sure and steady." Mr. Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.
"No, he has not come with me."
"Mary!" shrieked Regie, "he has not come."
"I knew he had not," said Mary. "When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else."
Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys' favorite child. However thoroughly they might divest themselves of parental partiality, they could not but observe that she was as sensible as a grown-up person.
"I thought he might be somewhere near," explained Regie, "in a tree or something," looking up into the little yew. "You can't tell with a conjurer like Uncle Dick, can you, Auntie Hester, whatever Mary may say?"
"Mary is generally wrong," said Hester, "but she is right for once."
Mary, who was early acquiring the comfortable habit of hearing only the remarks that found an echo in her own breast, heard she was right, and said, shrilly:
"I told Regie when we was still on the road that Uncle Dick wasn't there. Mother doesn't always go with father, but he said he'd run and see."
"We shall be ver'r late for luncheon," said Fräulein, hastily, blushing down to the onyx brooch at her turn-down collar, and drawing Mary away.
"Perhaps he left the half-penny with you," said Regie. "Fräulein would like to see it."
"No, no," said Fräulein, the tears in her eyes. "I do not vish at all. I cry half the night when I hear of it."
"I only cry when baby beats me," said Mary, balancing on one leg.
"I have not got the half-penny," said Rachel, the three elders studiously ignoring Mary's personal reminiscences.
The children were borne away by Fräulein, and the friends kissed and parted.
"I am coming to Wilderleigh to-morrow," said Rachel. "I shall be much nearer to you then."
"It is no good contending against Dick and fate," said Hester, shaking her finger at her. "You see it is all decided for you. Even the children have settled it."